Chapter 14

Over the next few months I was the only person using the building Rob and I referred to as the tune up shop. All the women still called it the recreation room. I'd often go in there, for an hour or two at a time, whenever I wanted to be alone with no chance that I'd be bothered. I always locked the door after myself, and never answered any knocks, or responded to people calling my name from outside the building. After a time, people started knowing better than to disturb me when I was inside the building.

Tina and I had achieved an uneasy truce of sorts. As her pregnancy got further advanced, and her body began getting bigger, she started believing she was no longer beautiful. No matter how hard all of us tried to reassure her that she was even more beautiful now, she wouldn't let herself be convinced. In her own eyes, she was now fat and ugly.

To attempt to soothe and console her, I started bringing her into my bedroom, to sleep with me. It was almost the only way to keep her from constantly feeling sad and unhappy. In bed with me, with my arm draped over her side, touching her burgeoning stomach, Tina stayed calm and contented. We both seemed to sleep better together like that.

There were times when we'd have sex together too. Not every night, as had once been our custom, but frequently enough to keep the nervousness and edginess off both of us. I rationalized this by telling myself it wasn't good for the baby to have a mother who spent so much of her time crying while carrying him or her. I knew I had other reasons for wanting to do it, but I figured it would be better to keep doing what we were, at least until after the baby came.

A month after I'd fired her, I gave Anita her job back. It made no sense for me to waste all her ability, or for her to sit around doing nothing. Again, I rationalized this decision by thinking she was less likely to cause me problems if I kept her busy working on the farm.

A few weeks after I held that meeting in the tune up shop, Rob announced, just before we were going to be sitting down at the dinner table one night, that he and Connie would henceforth be living together, and that she would be taking her meals, from then on, with him. After telling us this, Rob went outside to find her, and then brought her to the table to eat with us. I could tell that Tina was happy to have her cousin at the table. They chatted all through dinner, while Rob and I spoke together about a huge land deal he was hoping to get a listing for. All the time he and I were talking, I kept seeing the two of them constantly turning to get quick looks at each other. Whatever had changed between them had been sudden, and I could see that they were now excited by being with each other.

That night in bed, I asked Tina if she thought Connie would end up being a good match for Rob. I was hoping to find out if Rob was going to end up like me, or if there was some chance that Connie would end up being in love with him. Seeing how Rob's face had looked, while he gazed at her, I was afraid that he'd be hurt as badly as I'd been, if it turned out that she was simply using him to improve her standard of living.

"Didn't you see how they were looking at each other? You used to look at me like that too, before all the trouble started. I really miss being loved like that. You don't need to be worried, Connie really likes Rob."

"I do still love you, Tina. A fact that causes me a lot of problems. You don't just stop loving somebody because you find out it isn't the same for them. If I could find a way to just like you, I'd be a whole lot happier with things. There should be some way to regulate feelings, so each side has the same level of emotional investment."

"I care about you more than you think I do. I was very happy with how we were together, back when we really were together. A lot happier than I am now, that's for sure. If you cared just as much for me as I do for you, we could be happy together again."

"I'm trying to get down to that point, believe me. If I'd known, early on, the truth about you, maybe we could have kept things on an equal level as far as our feelings for each other went. Now, I don't know how to pull myself back to where we'd both feel the same."

We'd been having other small patches of drainage issues in that one area where all the oldest trees were. Lupe had gone ahead and done some digging, with a shovel, and he found a real thick network of roots from all the trees on that row. It was situated about two or three feet below the surface.

His theory for why this had happened went back to that one summer when we'd had such protracted high temperatures. Because so much of the irrigation water had evaporated before it had a chance to soak into the ground, the trees had sent out new, smaller, roots, in an attempt to get enough moisture to be able to survive. These roots were now all interwoven together, with their high level of concentration serving as something like a basket, slowing down, and, sometimes, preventing the irrigation water from percolating down through the soil like it normally would.

I sent Anita out riding the post hole digger, and had her sink four foot deep holes, spaced at three foot intervals, all along the three rows that were already showing drainage problems. When she was finished with that, I told her to start taking an hour or two a day to do the same thing along every row we had under cultivation. The holes filled themselves right back up quickly, with the wind blowing the sand every day. All I wanted was that six inch diameter cut through the basket of roots, so the water had an opening to get through more quickly. That seemed to do the trick, and we were never bothered with any similar drainage problems after that.

Rob came to me, all embarrassed, wanting to ask me some questions about what I thought he should do, as far as permitting Connie to entertain girls in their bedroom, while he was away. I tried to tell him it was his decision. I told him that I didn't allow Tina to do any entertaining in the house, but I had no problem with him doing so with Connie, if doing that wouldn't cause him any problems.

"I was kind of thinking of holding back permission, to see if I could get her to do something at night, while I was there to watch them."

"You might end up causing yourself big problems trying to do that. More than it would be worth to you, even if you did end up getting her permission to watch them going at it. I don't think Connie would agree to that anyway. None of the girls have ever said anything to make me think they would want to do things that way."

"It was just a thought. I'll probably end up telling her its okay to use our bedroom then. You wouldn't think it when you look at her, or see how quiet she acts around men, but Connie is a real dynamo in bed. I don't see how I'm going to be able to keep up with her, mostly on account of this bum knee of mine. Since she moved in with me, my knee has taken more punishment than it ought to be taking. There isn't a knee brace made that could stand up to the punishment my knee takes when the two of us are thrashing around on the bed. Once, we fell off the damn bed. Luckily, I ended up landing on my back, and she didn't land on the knee."

I was happy that Connie had Rob so excited and enthused. I just hoped he wouldn't end up like me, in love with a woman who was only capable of experiencing real deep rooted emotion for other women.

On May 11th, Tina woke me up to tell me that she was having eight minute contractions. She said it was time for me to drive her to the hospital. It was two thirty in the morning. She had been packed for weeks with this little baby blue suitcase containing everything she thought she might possibly need for a two day hospital stay. We didn't bother waking anyone, and I didn't think to leave a note to say where we were going.

My son, Michael Allen Trainer, was born at four twenty four that same afternoon. His Aunt Anita and Uncle Rob were there with me, in the waiting room they have for family members. Lupe and Raul were there with their wives and Tina's other aunt, along with all his second cousins, including Ricky Ricardo, who was probably a third cousin, if I remembered correctly how those things were calculated.

As soon as I saw my son, I felt a strong connection with him. He looked exactly like I'd hoped he would, which is to say good looking like his mother, but with paler skin, and lighter hair, just like mine.

"You going to get him DNA tested, Kyle?" Rob whispered this to me while we were standing together in front of the big plate glass window, looking at my son laying in his baby holder, or whatever those things are called. They had him wrapped up tightly, in a blue blanket, so that only his tiny face was visible.

"Do you think I need to? I'm pretty well satisfied he's mine."

"I'm pretty sure he is too. Look at that nose. If that isn't a Trainer nose, I don't know what is. He's lighter complexioned than I'd have expected too. I'm happy for you, Kyle, but a bit jealous that you beat me again by having a kid before I did."

"Stop using those condoms, and you'll catch up fast, or else put those magnum's on and see what happens when they come off while you're fucking, That'd be the same thing as not wearing one, almost."

"Now that Tina has had the baby, do you know what you're going to do?"

"Not yet. At least now we can sit down and start talking about our options. Before, I didn't want to make her upset, because of the baby. Now that he's born, I was thinking about finding out if she wants to move the two of them down to the tune up shop. That would keep Michael close enough to where I could be near him as he grows up. The problem is that she insisted on fixing up the spare room for a nursery, even though she put a crib in my bedroom too. I don't think it will be that easy to convince her to put him anywhere else for at least a little bit. We'll talk about it though, after she gets back home, and the two of them get settled in. Tina has always made such a big thing about wanting to be living in the big house. It might be better, for everyone, if I was to move over to the tune up shop."

"Or, you could just do nothing, and wait to see how that worked?"

"We'll play it by ear. One thing I do know, is that we definitely need to talk, and, hopefully, find something we can both agree on. I've been putting it off for too long already. Now that she's had the baby, she'll probably want to get back to how it was before she found out she was pregnant, going off somewhere, and getting back to doing those tune up things with all the other girls. That's part of the reason I thought it would be better if I set her up over in the tune up shop. That way, I wouldn't have to know what she was up to."

"Connie has cut way back on what she does with the other girls. Other than Emay and Anita, I haven't heard her talking about being with any of the others for some time now. She always tells me if she has someone over to visit her. That was part of the agreement we made."

When I brought Tina and the baby home, I relaxed my rule about her not having any visitors upstairs, so people on the farm could come up and get a quick peek at the baby. Everyone came up at least once, but Anita and Connie came up lots of times, almost every day, to be with the baby, and to keep Tina company as she healed from the stitches they'd needed to put in her after she tore a little, from having the baby.

One morning, around six weeks after Michael was born, I came back in the bedroom for something, and Tina was standing in front of the bathroom mirror. She was using both her hands, grabbing and twisting all the loose skin still on her stomach. She'd do that, then start tracing her fingers over all the stretch marks she now had. She was completely naked, and I saw that she was crying.

"If you started going out more and walking, that skin would tighten up again, and you'd feel better about yourself. You can get Connie or Maria to come up here and stay with the baby, if you wanted to come outside and start walking again."

"Do you know it has been four months now since you did anything with me? Six weeks since Miguel was born. Aren't you ever going to want to be with me again?"

"You're supposed to wait until you're all healed up, to allow your body time for all your inside parts to get settled back into the right place again. We need to have a talk too, about what we're going to do, now that you've had the baby."

"You're still wanting to get rid of us? I thought we had decided we were going to try to work these things out?"

"What I remember saying is I didn't want you worrying so much, because it could hurt the baby. Now that he's here, we still need to decide what to do."

I could see that nothing I was saying was going to get through to her, and it was only serving to make her even more upset and anxious. I grabbed what I'd come up to the room for and made a quick retreat. I passed Connie going up, as I was heading down the staircase.

"You need to try to get Tina calmed back down. She's upset now, and I don't want anything bad to happen with her milk. Michael needs his breast milk in order to grow up strong and healthy."

I spent the whole day out in the orchard, not even returning for my lunch. By the time supper was ready, I was starving. Maria told me that Anita was upstairs with Tina, and that the two of them had decided that they would eat in the bedroom. My first thought was that the two of them were probably tuning each other up. Just thinking that they might be doing that, made me really upset.

I ate quickly, not adding much to the table's mood, or to the supper conversation, before excusing myself and heading upstairs. Inside the bedroom, I found the two women sitting on the floor. Anita was brushing Tina's hair, while Tina appeared to be changing little Mike's diaper. Two trays, holding the remains of their supper, sat beside the two of them.

"If you girls are all done with your food, I'll take your trays down to save Maria having to make a trip back up here to pick them up?"

Anita nodded that she was through, but Tina had nothing she wanted to say to me. I grabbed both trays and headed back down the stairs. There wasn't much I wanted to watch on the TV, but I stayed downstairs until I found myself nodding off to sleep. I looked at my watch and it was after eleven. I turned off the TV and headed back up to the bedroom. When I got there, my son was asleep in his crib, and my wife was still on the floor, sleeping, with her head nestled in Anita's lap. Anita was running her hand over Tina's arm, almost like she was petting a scared animal.

Seeing me, Anita motioned for me to help Tina up. She seemed less than half awake as I got her up enough to help her over to her side of the bed, and then under the covers I'd pulled out for her. She was already dressed for bed, wearing this long, pullover, cotton night shirt she had taken to wearing in the last two months of her pregnancy, and on most nights since she'd come home from the hospital.

Before she left, Anita made it a point to let me know that Tina wasn't strong enough to go through any more of what she called my mind games.

"Just tell her what you've decided to do, and get it over with. You keep leading her on, then you say or do something to make her aware that you still haven't decided what her ultimate punishment is going to be. Just do what you're going to do, don't keep dragging it out like this, toying with her. She's a nervous wreck now."

I had come up to my bedroom tired, after having nodded off in the living room. As soon as Anita left, I found myself, once again, wide awake. She kept trying to turn things around, making it seem like all of this was my fault. I knew who the victim was here, and it certainly wasn't Tina or Anita. I resolved that I'd sit Tina down, the next chance I had, and get this thing settled, once and for all. My next chance came the following morning.